ABA Family Legal Guide

Renting Residential Property

Other Issues

Rent Control

What kinds of rent control laws are there?

New York City was the only municipality in the country to retain rent control after the end of World War II. The law there did not permit rent increases without specific permission from an administrative board. Rents could be raised based upon a pass-through of certain expense increases, such as the cost of fuel. Only a few apartments in New York are still governed by rent control. The current ordinance "stabilizes" rents.

From the late 1960s through 1978, other communities adopted rent control. Most of these laws allow automatic but limited rent increases without any requirement on the part of the landlord to show expense increases. Landlords are allowed to petition for larger increases on the basis of major repairs or extraordinarily large expenses that the normal rent increase would not cover. These so-called second-generation rent control laws have prevented some of the large rent increases experienced by tenants in other cities.